A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."

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Archive of Wolff Materials

Saturday, April 30, 2016

Let me now respond to Chris’s comment, keyed to a passage in
my little book In Defense of Anarchism. Since it has been a while, I will start by
reproducing the comment:

“Professor Wolff,
In In Defense of Anarchism, you provide a great argument against representative
democracy infringing on autonomy when you point out that if a set of candidates
were running on just 4 issues (an impossibly small world!), our two party
system would be painfully inadequate to accommodate real representation:

"Simplifying the real world considerably, we can suppose that there are
three alternative courses of action seriously being considered on the first
issue, four on the second, two on the third, and three on the last. There are
then 3 X 4 X 2 X 3 = 72 possible stands which a man might take on these four
issues." -RPW

So in just a 4 issue world, we need 72 possible candidates, in order for each
voter to at least have the possibility of voting for her preferred candidate.
We have two “strictly consider these people” presidential candidates.

It seems to me the error being made when people say "you really must vote
Democratic candidate X [cause it never matters who X is for the past 60 years],
over Republican Y [in this case real names are used, e.g., Trump]", is
that you assume somewhere on the hypothetically limited spectrum of 72 possible
choices, the Democrat is 'closer' to our position.

Again, keeping the world simple, let's say that of all 72 possible candidates,
Trump really is 72nd, i.e., in last place in terms of my hypothetically
preferred representatives (not sure this is actually true). That is, he takes
the maximally possibly wrong stance on every issue. But if Hillary Clinton is
71st, or 70th, hell 69th or 68th, and not something like 35th or 10th, does
"vote for the Dem" really make sense?

It seems to me the error being made in vote Dem X judgment, is the presumption
that the Dem is substantially closer to ideal candidate 1, than the republican.
But when the distance is oceanic, covered with barbed-wire, and patrolled by
ogres, at what point does this argument break down, If ever? At what point are
you asking people to compromise on SERIOUS and autonomously decided moral
principles, just to get their 71st choice?

Just as we wouldn't ask a serious pacifist to kill in the name of less killing,
at what point are we commanding of people a serious moral albatross, to the
point that the Dem vote is unwarranted?
Maybe I’m a literally crazy person, but the distance between Trump and Clinton
is extremely minute compared to the distance between my conscience and either
of them. And it can’t just be presumed a priori that the Dem fits well enough
into my preferred choices.

And on an entirely pragmatic note, if all the independents (which I am
registered as) really do commit Bernie or Bust, and that’s registered by party
strategist, you better believe that could go some way toward restructuring the
democratic party to be more progressive in 4-8 years. I sincerely DOUBT that
will happen when we all just hop in line and vote Hillary without a fight.”

The first thing to recall is that my example concerns voting
for someone who will represent you in the legislature that enacts laws. The logic of the argument is this: The de
jure legitimacy of democracy derives, supposedly, from the fact that those
who are bound to obey the laws make the laws, and hence are autonomous
[literally “giving laws to oneself” or being self-legislating.] In a representative democracy, the person I
choose, by voting, to represent me may not win, but at least I had a chance to
be represented by someone who, in the legislature, is pledged to act as my
agent and work my will. But if I am not
even presented on the ballot with such a person, then I have no chance to be
truly represented in the legislature, and hence I am not by any stretch of
reason obligated to obey the law. But if
there are even as few as three or four issues of importance before the nation, and
two or three logically independent possible positions on each issue, then the
ballot would have to list as many as 72 candidates, each holding a different
combination of possible positions, in order for it to be guaranteed that that I
am at least offered a suitable
representative of my will. And nothing
like this ever happens.

But in the American political system, a president is not a
representative in the legislature. He or
she is an executive. So my little argument
is not really apposite. Given the
conclusion to which I come in that book, I begin with the assumption that no
American government is de jure
legitimate. My problem is to decide, in
a situation of total governmental illegitimacy, what it is best for me to
do. And that requires me to make
uncertain estimates of the probable future behavior of whatever candidates for
the presidency are offered to me on the ballot, along with estimates, equally
uncertain, of the legislative and other consequences of one person or the other
occupying the office of president.

Let me sketch my reasons for thinking Clinton is to be preferred
to Trump by myself or someone holding roughly my political beliefs. I hope it may go without saying that my
judgments, involving as they do very uncertain predictions, are hardly offered
as incontrovertible.

I think it is very clear what sort of President Clinton
would be. She has been a public figure
for decades, and there is really very little mystery about her beliefs, her
administrative style, or her character.
The same cannot be said about Trump.
I believe him to be deeply psychologically unstable, as I have
indicated. [Robert Shore calls that “a
cheap shot,” which strikes me as a truly bizarre comment, but I shall let that
pass.] He is working hard to arouse, intensify,
and legitimate ugly, fascist tendencies in the population of which I am
genuinely frightened. Perhaps I am too powerfully
influenced by the world’s experiences in the 20th century, but I am
not at all confident that America is safe from those dangerous political
passions. Might Trump be a pacifist
sheep in wolf’s clothing? Perhaps, but I
doubt it, and I am loathe to take that risk.
Might he prove to be a champion of the interests of the dispossessed and
down-trodden? Perhaps, though that
really does seem to me to be a stretch.
Collecting up and examining his assorted public statements is pointless,
in my judgment, because they are contradictory, episodic, and manifestly not
thought through.

Some things are more certain. First, if he is elected, then in all
likelihood he will have a Republican Senate as well as a Republican House. That will mean a reactionary Supreme Court
for the next thirty years, in which case voting suppression, the repeal of LGBT
rights, gerrymandering, and the complete triumph of corporate capitalism in the
courts will be a certainty. Under those
circumstances, a progressive movement will be strangled in the cradle.

Will Trump actually be less hawkish than Clinton? It is impossible to say. He is so utterly ignorant of everything
having to do with foreign policy that he will be completely at the mercy of his
advisors, and from the little evidence we have, those advisors do not inspire
me with hope.

What of Clinton? She
will pursue an aggressive foreign and military policy, and she will do little,
if anything, to rein in the power and freedom of the financial sector. She will pursue a Center-Left economic
policy, with emphasis on reproductive rights, economic rights for women, some
incremental strengthening of the Affordable care Act, and a continuation of the
Obama Administration’s solid work addressing climate change.

Under a Clinton Administration, there will be a chance, just a chance, of a progressive
movement in America, if Bernie chooses to lead the charge and establishes an ongoing
organization to fight in local, state, and federal contests for the election of
truly progressive office holders. That, in
my judgment, is our best hope, our only hope, for real change in this
country. Will Clinton support such a
movement? Of course not. Will she undercut it? I do not think so, since she will need its support
for her re-election.

Is it worth taking a chance on Trump for the possibility of
a surprisingly progressive presidency? I
do not think so, and my reason is that I remain genuinely frightened of the
emergence of real home-grown American style fascism.

Now, all of this is unavoidably speculative, although I am
pretty confident of my expectations concerning a Clinton presidency, if not for
a Trump presidency. So Chris may disagree
with me, after looking at all of the same facts. But I would urge all of us to think about
this coldly and calculatedly. We are a
long way from a situation in which we can feel joy about our alternatives.

Friday, April 29, 2016

I am getting sick and tired of being the punching bag for other people's distress. So, Bob, put up or shut up. Next November, you will have a choice: You can vote for Trump, vote for Clinton, vote for a third party candidate if one happens to appear on your ballot, or not vote. Choose one and explain right here why you have made that choice. Those are the only choices you will have. I don't want to hear about how upset you are at having those choices. That is the way it is. Leave me out of it. I won't be in the voting booth with you, and I won't be printing up your ballot or handing it to you. Just explain, TAKING EVERYTHING INTO ACCOUNT, what you propose to do, and then justify that choice.Let's hear it.

Freud teaches us, Jung to the contrary notwithstanding, that
there are no universal symbols in the processes of the mind [“Sometimes a cigar
is just a cigar”]. It is therefore necessary
to follow the unpredictable course of free association to gain access to the
unconscious. For this reason, armchair “psychoanalysis”
of historical figures or persons one does not personally know is
valueless. Literary critics too are
aware that the significance of symbols is peculiar to each author. In the novels of Edith Wharton, for example, thresholds
play a special role [see the frame structure of Ethan Frome]. For another
novelist, they may hold no special significance whatsoever.

It is therefore fruitless for me to speculate about the
primitive unconscious thought processes of Donald Trump, someone I have never
met and, it goes without saying, have never led through a process of free
association. But the temptation is
irresistible, and as I have never been particularly adept at resisting
temptation, here goes. To preserve a
semblance of scientific rigor, I shall cast these idle fancies in the form of
predictions. As the Fall campaign
unfolds, you may check to see whether my expectations are confirmed. Since, as we all know, post hoc, ergo propter hoc, the success of my predictions will
confirm my speculations.

Trump gives every evidence of being, at a very primitive
level, both fascinated with and repelled by women. He is frightened by strong women and flattered
by submissive, conventionally attractive women. He is obsessed with women’s sexuality as a prize
to be won and worn on his sleeve, and he is deeply disgusted by women’s bodily
functions. Judging by his comments about
Megyn Kelly and Hillary Clinton, he does not sharply distinguish between
urination or excretion on the one hand and menstruation on the other, which suggests
that he is fixated at roughly the stage of psychosexual development of a three
year old. He is also morbidly sensitive
about the size of his hands and the folk wisdom concerning their connection to
the size of his sexual organ.

None of this is especially unusual, of course. All of us are in the grip of these sorts of
infantile obsessions, which through a process of sublimation we convert into
socially acceptable adult passions.
[Think, for example, of the extraordinarily aggressive psychosexual
language in which mild-mannered mathematicians talk about their proofs –
driving through a proof, ramming home a conclusion, dismissing the proofs of
competitors as “trivial.” Anyone who
does not feel the aggressive thrust of a logical demonstration, which compels
acquiescence, is not paying attention.] What
sets Trump apart from the general run of human beings is his utter inability to
control the eruption of these primitive thought processes into speech,
unmediated and unfiltered by the workings of an adult ego. It is as though he is perpetually engaged in
free association.

After watching Trump and listening to him for months, I have
become convinced that he is going to find it psychologically intolerable to
compete on the public stage with a strong, self-confident woman. If, as I anticipate, the polls show Clinton
beating him, Trump will find this simply unbearable, and his outbursts will
become ever more bizarrely inappropriate.
He has already begun making disparaging remarks about Clinton “playing
the woman card” and about her “shouting” when she gives public speeches. Soon, he will bring up Bill Clinton’s sexual
dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, and, I predict, will say that Bill strayed
because Hillary could not satisfy him sexually.
Unthinkable! you say? Wait for
it.

He will be compelled to engage in at least one or two public
debates with Clinton. If, as I hope, she
responds to his personal attacks by laughing at him, this affront to his amour proper will be intolerable to him. He is an insult comedian who has unexpectedly
risen above himself. Along about middle
October, when it becomes clear that he is going to lose badly, and to a woman,
I predict that he will go seriously bonkers.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

I just learned that Judge Merrick Garland, Obama's nominee for Scalia's seat on the High Court, was a '74 graduate at Harvard in Social Studies, the program of which I was the first Head Tutor in 1960-61. Suddenly he seems like a more acceptable choice.

The die is cast.
Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee; Hillary Clinton will be the
Democratic nominee. I leave it to each
of you to go through the five stages of grieving at your own pace. The time has come to ask, What is to be done? I am going to argue that each of us must do
whatever possible to ensure that Hillary Clinton wins the election, and also
whatever possible to transform Bernie’s campaign into a genuine movement.

I ask a favor of each of you: spare me the impassioned and
accusatory list of reasons why Clinton is horrible. I know them all, and agree with them
all. What is more, I am older than
almost everyone who reads this blog, in many cases fifty or sixty years older. If Clinton is elected, and if her Wall Street
soulmates will refrain from again crashing the American economy, she is likely
to be re-elected, which means that I will be ninety-one when she leaves
office. Don’t talk to me about despair!

First of all, it is essential to defeat Trump in the general
election. He is a hateful, narcissistic,
rabble-rousing sociopath. Might he make
decisions as President that would be objectively better than those made by
Clinton? Of course. Mussolini made the trains run on time. Might he appoint Supreme Court justices that would
set this country back half a century?
Almost certainly. You don’t care
about that? Well, I have a proud gay
son, and I do. Suck it up. Nobody guaranteed you a world full of happy
choices between the good, the better, and the best.

But that is just the short term desideratum. What we need in
this country is a progressive movement, and as Bernie is fond of saying, change
always comes from the bottom up, not from the top down. That means everyone must vote in off-year elections. Everyone must join and in some way support a
movement from below in cities, in states, as well as in the nation as a
whole. You don’t like “bathroom bills”
like North Carolina’s HB2? Then work to
defeat the governor who signed it into law.
You want to do something about income inequality? That will require progressive majorities in
both Houses of Congress, and even then it is hardly guaranteed. You thrill to the news that millennials have
a favorable opinion of socialism, even though they haven’t a clue what it is? Then start organizing.

There is no end of the things needed to bring about
change. We need people who will march,
and people who will sit down and link arms.
We need people who will run for the local School Committee and people
who will fold and stuff envelopes. We
need people who will go door to door, and people who will set up information
tables at the local supermarket. The
first rule of all political change is: Choose something you like to do, because you will have to
keep on doing it even when the excitement evaporates and the media move on to
the next Big Thing. And you will have to
still be doing it thirty years from now.
Finally, take to heart the advice that Paul Newman gives to Robert Redford
about how to play the Big Con against Robert Shaw in The Sting: If you win, it
will not be enough, but it is all you are going to get, so you will have to
accept it for what it is.

What will I be doing?
Well, I hate going door to door and talking to people I do not know, but
I can give money, and that is something, even if it is not the most important
thing. So I have given $2,500 to Bernie’s
campaign, and I will give regularly to a movement if he will start it. I can write, so I will do that. Lord knows, writing is pretty low on the list
of desiderata, but somebody needs to do it, and I am pretty good at it. What matters is doing something rather than nothing.
If we are to be successful, we will need, at a minimum, ten million
people marching together. Don’t worry if
you are not one of the parade marshals. Think
of social change as being like a landslide.
If one big tree becomes uprooted and rolls down a mountainside, that is
an interesting event, but it does not change the mountain. But when a hundred thousand trees, bushes,
boulders, and pebbles roll down the same side of the hill, the mountain is
changed forever.

Monday, April 25, 2016

Among several very kind and encouraging comments about the possibility of my attempting a full-scale book-length integration of half a lifetime's work on the thought of Karl Marx was Jim's allusion to my facetious remark about books falling from my sleeves like tribbles. [To those of you who are not trekkies, that was an illusion to a classic episode of the original Star Trek called "The Trouble With Tribbles." Tribbles were the interstellar version of schmoos, from the old Al Capp comic strip L'il Abner.] I thought I would spend a bit of time talking about the good old days, when I was a young aspiring academic. In the late 60's and into the 70's and 80's, it was actually easier to publish an academic book than it was to fall off a log, since there were not many logs on the typical college campus but there were always editors eager for book proposals. There were two reasons for this happy state of affairs: The GI Bill and Sputnik. Let me explain.

Until Word War Two [or "the big one," as Archie Bunker liked to call it], very few young men and even fewer young women went to college. But the GI Bill offered financial aid to returning vets, and in response the higher education sector exploded in growth. State universities sprouted satellite campuses, state college systems metastasized, and community colleges popped up like summer flowers. Each of these entities needed a library, a fact that drove up the market for academic books. At the same time, the Cold War became an obsession with politicians, and when, in 1957, the Soviet Union beat America in the race to be first in space, launching into orbit a tiny satellite nicknamed Sputnik, the demand grew for America to "do something." [I was engaged in Basic Training at Fort Dix in New Jersey when Sputnik was launched, and we could see the tiny dot of light move across the sky as we stood in formation in the pre-dawn.]The next year, the National Defense Education Act was passed by the Congress. As the title suggests, the goal was to enlist the newly expanded higher education sector in America's imperial plan for world domination [although it was not quite put that way], so much of the money went to fund Centers for the Study of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and anywhere else that America saw an enemy or the possibility of an ally. But some of the money slopped over into the budgets of campus libraries.The result of all this expansion and funding was that for several decades, a publisher who brought out an academic text couldn't lose. By the time the author's family and friends had bought copies and a sizable fraction of the nation's college libraries had added it to their collections, the sales were enough to break even. If anyone actually read the damned thing, the publisher would make a profit. Editors of respected presses started hanging out on street corners like pimps and drug pushers, soliciting manuscripts. Those of us who were the beneficiaries of this happy state of affairs, needless to say, attributed it to our intellectual brilliance, but the truth was that we were in the seller's market to beat all seller's markets. Now, at this time, during much of the 60's, both I and my wife were in full-scale psychoanalysis. A fifty-minute analytic hour only cost $25 then, but since, as a senior member of the Columbia faculty, I was only making about $13,000 or $14,000 a year, that took a large bite out of my salary. I was tap dancing as fast as I could to pay the bills. I was moonlighting, I was teaching summer school, and I was grabbing every publishing opportunity that offered an advance. When New American Library approached me to edit a little number to be called Ten Great Works of Philosophy, all I asked was "What's the advance?" The editor replied "A thousand on signing, a thousand on submission of the manuscript." I did the job so fast that before they could send me the thousand on signing I handed in the finished book. [That was 1970. Forty-six years later, the wretched thing is still in print. At last royalty statement, it had sold a total of 196,215 copies -- my most successful "book."] When I gave a talk at a college in '71, the young professor who introduced me said, "Professor Wolff recently joined the Book of the Month Club, but he misread the instructions. They required him to buy a book a month, but he thought he had to publish a book a month."Was this an evidence of intellectual brilliance, of virtue, of creativity? Of course not. It was, to use a locution from horse-breeding, from desperation out of opportunity. As Ann Richards famously said of George W. Bush, we were born on third and thought we had hit a triple.That is how it used to be. Now, alas, it is a trifle more difficult to bring out a book. Editors have stopped behaving like drug pushers and have started behaving like the maitre d' at an exclusive restaurant, responding with a mixture of hauteur and scorn when you approach them, manuscript in hand, to ask piteously whether they would consider publishing it.So, should I write yet another book, a big-shouldered integration of half a lifetime of work on Marx? We shall see.

Saturday, April 23, 2016

I have returned from the Northland. The trip was a delight. Aside from the two talks, which I shall say something about in a moment, I saw an old, old friend, Sylvain Bromberger, who at ninety-one is bright, lively, and as delightful as ever; I spent an hour and a half with Charles Parsons reminiscing about old times at Harvard; and Charles and I ran into Amelie Rorty in the street in Harvard Square -- I have not seen Amelie in decades. All in all, a real homecoming.The Brown and MIT events were great fun -- a good turnout at both, with lively conversation. Alex Gourevich of Brown organized the first event, and arranged to have it videotaped, so once it is posted on the Brown site I will share a link, should anyone want to watch it. Alex then came to the MIT event the next day [he lives in Boston], although that one was organized by Lucas Stanczyk of MIT, so Alex had to listen to my stories twice, poor soul.The young people -- doctoral students at Brown, MIT, and Harvard -- were bright, intense, and asked good questions. One especially nice thing -- the distinguished Kant scholar Paul Guyer. who teaches at Brown, came to that event. I had never met him and was quite touched that he showed up.The Brown talk started at 4 p.m. on Thursday, and the MIT talk ended [including lunch] at 2 p.m. on Friday, so in the space of twenty-two hours, I engaged in more high-level discussion of my work than I have experienced in the preceding twenty-years or more. Remarkable.I have started brooding about the possibility of undertaking an extended book-length integration of the extensive work I have done on the thought of Karl Marx in the past forty years. I am not sure anyone would want to read it, and I cannot imagine that any press would want to publish it, but I shall think about the idea for a bit.Now, about Donald Trump ...

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

I just took a look at the Constitution, and it looks to me as though the old Congress would choose the president from the list of the five people with the most electoral votes in case no one had a majority. Does anyone know for sure whether this is right?

David Ehrens, a faithful reader of this blog, sent me the
following comment in an e-mail [for reasons beyond my feeble powers of
comprehension, Google will not let him post the comment directly]: “I truly hope others will see it is time to
create an alternative to the Democratic Party -- perhaps one that can
coordinate and work with the Democrats, but one that will call its own tune and
have its own conventions. What say you?”

I have long had a dream of a truly progressive left party
[never mind a Socialist Party like the one my grandfather committed his life to
in New York City a century ago.] But the
structure of American politics, as we all know, works against third parties on
the national stage, although there is a long tradition of successful left
parties at the state level. Let us think
about this for a bit.

First of all, I don’t want to see us run third party
presidential candidates. The best we
could do is win enough electoral votes to throw the election into the House,
and there the Right has a structural advantage.
Recall from your high school Civics class [if you are old enough to have
had one], that when the president is chosen by the House, because no candidate
wins a majority of the electoral votes, the State House delegations vote as
units, a procedure that gives small states a huge advantage. I spent a few minutes on Google
checking. In 2008, when the Democrats
held the Presidency, a super majority in the Senate, and the House, the House
delegation breakdown was 25 Democratic, 21 Republican, and 4 split – barely enough
to take the Presidency. At the present
moment, the breakdown is 33 Republican, 14 Democratic, 3 split. I really do not want to throw the election
into the House!

What we need to think about is a fundamental realignment of
the electorate. The Republican Party is,
I am coming to believe, irrevocably sundered. The natural realignment would be for the Bernie
wing to split from the corporatist, elitist wing of the Democratic Party, and
woo to its ranks the non-college educated white working class Trump voters,
along straight economic interest lines:
attack Wall Street, raise the minimum wage, stop sending jobs overseas,
and so on.

BUT: This new third party, which would seek to
elect members of the House and local office holders and maybe a senator or two,
could not be a nativist, xenophobic, racist, misogynist, homophobic party. So the big question [what we oldsters used to
call the sixty-four dollar question, before inflation hit] is: Could an anti-elitist inclusive pitch win
over the Trumpettes to a socially progressive third party, or is their hatred
of everyone not like themselves really baked in?

The numerous reports of voters expressing a preference for “Trump
or Sanders” suggests that the answer may be a qualified yes. If so, then European-style coalition
politics, at least in the House, might be conceivable, at least if Bernie’s
hordes could gain enough traction to elect enough members of the House to
bargain with the Democratic Party.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

In preparation for my brief trip north, to speak at Brown and MIT, I have been turning over in my mind what I shall be saying about my work on the thought of Karl Marx, and I have come to realize that almost everything I have written during the second half of my life is, in one way or another, connected to my attempt to come to terms with the depth and complexity of Marx's great work Capital. Obviously, the two books and many articles I have published or have written for this blog on Marx's thought are connected. But so too are other apparently unrelated essays: Narrative Time, The Indexing Problem, Notes for a Materialist Analysis of the Public and the Private Realms [which is ostensibly about Hannah Arendt], The Study of Society, and much more.Perhaps Hegel was right that "the Owl of Minerva only spreads its wings with the falling of the dusk."If it were not the case, as we are reminded by Ecclesiastes, that "of making many books there is no end," I might attempt a valedictory volume weaving together everything I have done these past forty years. But then, who on earth would publish it!

Monday, April 18, 2016

The extraordinary Republican primary battle has forced me to
brood more extensively about the formal structure of the American political system
than I have ever done before. I find
myself particularly puzzled about how to think about the dispute between Donald
Trump and Reince Priebus. [Was it
Aristotle or was it Plato who said that shit does not have a form? How can a Trump-Priebus dispute possibly give
rise to thoughts worthy of a sentient being?]

As my American readers will know, Trump is arguing that the
candidate who gets the most votes and has the most delegates coming into the
Convention should be awarded the nomination.
The Stop Trump forces are saying that so long as Trump lacks a majority
on the first ballot, his claim on the nomination can be nullified by the votes
of the freed-up delegates on the second and subsequent ballots. And so on.

Here is what has me puzzled.
Political Parties in the United States are, in the eyes of the law,
private organizations, not public or even quasi-public entities [I think this
is right.] Parties are continuing
organizations that exist presumably for the purpose of advancing some
determinate political policies or a political vision by electing local, state,
and federal representatives who will then use the resources and legal powers of
government to implement those policies or that vision. To be sure, American political parties,
unlike those in many European or Asian countries, tend to be broad aggregations
of regional, racial, religious, economic and other interests, but at any given
time, it is possible to identify some core political orientation that
characterizes the party.

It seems reasonable therefore that a party should refuse to nominate
as its presidential candidate someone who does not at all represent what the party
at that time stands for. I mean, suppose
Bernie Sanders had announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination and, mirabile dictu had started winning
Republican primaries. Would the Republican
Party really not have the right to “ignore the will of the voters” and bar him
by some arcane rule change from hi-jacking the party? Would the Democratic Party really not have
the same right if a bona fide
Republican – say Hillary Clinton – were to attempt pull off the same trick on
it?

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Some of you may remember Tanya Mears, Andrew Rosa, Rita Reynolds, and Bekesizwe Ndimande, former students whom I invited to join my imaginary classroom for my ideology YouTube lectures. All four of them were promoted with tenure this year: Tanya at Worcester State University, Andrew at Western Kentucky, Rita at Wagner College, and Bekesizwe at the University of Texas San Antonio. Needless to say, I am bursting with pride.

Friday, April 15, 2016

Question: Why does a very intelligent person do something that appears stupid?Answer: Because, contrary to appearances, it is not stupid.Question: Why does Hillary Clinton, a very intelligent person, refuse to release the transcripts of her Wall Street speeches, even though not doing so hurts her, and is therefore apparently stupid?Only Possible Answer; Because there is something in the speeches the release of which would hurt her worse than not releasing them.Question: What is in them?Speculative Answer: Reassurances to the audience, in some form or other, explicitly or implicitly, that they have nothing really to fear from her as President.Nothing else makes sense.

Right after last night's Brooklyn Clinton/Sanders debate, Bernie and Jane Sanders hopped a plane to Rome so that Bernie could address a Vatican conference. I think they return tonight. How on earth do they do it? How does anyone survive the rigors of a presidential campaign? Forty years ago, when I was in my forties, I cobbled together three speaking invitations and went on a mini-speaking "tour" -- three cities in three days. When I got home, I was totaled for a week. I know Bernie is a man of the people and all that, but I hope the campaign popped for Business Class so he could get some sleep.By the way, Clinton showed herself last night to be an awful campaigner. What is it with those Goldman Sachs speech transcripts? She is not stupid. There must be something rather unsavory in them after all if she is so resistant to releasing them. I leave it to others to speculate.And yes, S. Wallerstein, Krugman is forcing me to reconsider my judgment that he is, under it all, an actual person.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

I was watching Andrea Mitchell interviewing Jane Sanders [Bernie's wife and chief adviser] during lunch a few minutes ago and finally hear her say the words I have been waiting for. Mitchell asked her whether, if Bernie failed to get the nomination, he would feel that he had, nevertheless, achieved a good deal. Now, all of us political junkies know that the automatic no-brainer de rigueur answer to that question is, "Well, Andrea, we are confident that we are going to win." But Jane Sanders is an actual person, so instead she gave an honest answer, and it made my day. "We have started a revolution," she said. "If Bernie wins, he will expect all the people who have supported him to keep working for that revolution, and if he does not win, we will continue to lead that revolution and want all of his supporters to keep working" [or words to that effect.] My heart swelled. Those are the words I have been waiting for. I am all in.By the way, just before this interview, Robbie Mook, Clinton spokesperson, was interviewed. He simply could not answer Mitchell's repeated question, namely, "Is it hypocrisy for Secretary Clinton to walk the Verizon Communications Workers of America picket line when she took $225,000 from Verizon in 2013 for a speech?" Mitchell is a class act.

When I was a young man coming up, as we used to say, one of
the hot topics in philosophy was private languages. The issue arose in Epistemology, where
everyone worried about whether I had a private language to describe my
immediate sensory experience [“sense data,” we called it] and whether, if I
did, I could communicate that experience by means of it to you. It also came up in Ethics, where everyone
worried about whether I could ever compare my pains to yours [or my pleasures,
but we tended to be more pessimistic in those days. It was before the Sixties.]

All of which flashed through my mind when I read about Inky,
the New Zealand octopus. It seems Inky,
holed up in a Wellington aquarium, saw a tiny fissure in the wire mesh at the
top of his tank, squeezed through it after hours, slid down the side of the tank
to the floor, sidled over to a storm drain, slithered through that, and made
his way to freedom in the Pacific Ocean.
I had always read that octopi were unusually intelligent, though I could
never figure out how anyone knew. I would have liked the aquarium attendants [who wished
Inky well, by the way – he was very popular] to make more of an effort to
communicate with him. Do you suppose he
has a private language?

Now I understand why I have always declined to eat calamari,
even though I love raw oysters.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

Hillary Clinton and Bill De Blasio, mayor of New York City, got in a bit of trouble
yesterday because of De Blasio’s joke about “CPT.” For those not in the know, “CPT" is a common
joking expression in the Black community.
It stands for “Colored People’s Time,” and means “being chronically
late.” Here is an example of its use. The first year of our doctoral program in the
UMass Afro-American Studies Department, of which I was Graduate Program Director
[or GPD] for the first twelve years, as the Graduate School deadline for
applications approached, we had received very few applications. I was a nervous wreck, and went about the
department fretting. My colleague, John
Bracey, a burly Black scholar who had come out of the Chicago branch of CORE
[and whose mother was a college professor] was laid back and unconcerned. “Stop worrying, Bob,” he said one day, “they
are on CPT.” John was quite right. At the last moment, we received a quite
satisfactory pile of applications and chose our first class.

I was also surprised at first to hear my colleagues, all
very smart and serious scholars, call one another “nigger” jokingly or refer
dismissively to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the high profile and rather
self-important Chair of the Harvard Afro-Am Department, as the “HNIC” [or, as
it was explained to me, “Head Nigger In Charge.”]

I made the huge mistake of thinking that it was all right
for me to speak that way, and when I referred to Gates at the first meeting of
an undergraduate course as the HNIC promptly lost half of the students who had
signed up.

It is not difficult to understand why de Blasio used the expression. He has been married for twenty-five years or
so to a Black woman with whom he has several children. He probably just forgot that things he could
say at home might create a problem in the hothouse world of politics.

As I watched Bernie addressing striking Verizon workers in Brooklyn a few minutes ago, tears came to my eyes. That is the sort of politics I yearn for. All right, I am just a soft-hearted sucker for old-fashioned working class solidarity. I know, I know, he can't win, not even with a quick trip to the Vatican, but in a better world, an appearance by a candidate for the Democratic nomination at a rally of striking workers would not even be worth a mention on the evening news. Take that, Paul Krugman!Go Bernie!

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Although my recent posts on this blog would seem to indicate
that I am totally absorbed by the primary contests in the Democratic and Republican
parties, in fact my mind has been for the most part lately focused on the two
talks I shall be giving next week at Brown and MIT. As I have thought through the sequence of
things I plan to say, it has occurred to me that two of my on-line writings,
when combined, form an extremely good introduction to the work I have done on
Marx these past forty years or so. If
anyone has an interest in a brief overview of that work, they might read The Study of Society and A Unified Reading of Marx, both
available on box.net via the link at the top of this page. Together, those two essays run roughly 41,000
words, which is to say, about as long as what Professors of Law call “a note.” To that one might add Narrative Time, originally published in Midwest Studies in Philosophy and also available on box.net.

The deeper message of all three essays is that the study of
society is unavoidably ideologically inflected.
Hence my statement that one ought to read great works of social theory
in the original rather than as redacted in textbooks. S. Wallerstein asks which other works,
besides Capital, one should read in
that fashion. I would certainly say Max
Weber’s Economy and Society, Karl
Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, Thomas
Hobbes’ Leviathan, Erving Goffman’s Presentations of Self in Everyday Life, and
Emile Durkheim’s Suicide. [Also many other works by Marx, but
sufficient unto the day.]

Monday, April 11, 2016

Those of us on the left have spent a good deal of time
lately worrying about Trump’s prospects in a general election, seizing on early
polling match-ups with Sanders or Clinton to reassure ourselves that he would
not win. Here is one small inconclusive
bit of good news. Sam Wang, a Princeton
neuroscientist who runs a nerdy blog in his spare time that crunches the election
numbers, and who has had spectacular success in past cycles predicting
outcomes, has lately been handicapping the Republican primary battle, and he
has found that although Cruz regularly outperforms his polling numbers, Trump’s
actual results track his polls very closely.
In the absence of contrary evidence, this offers some assurance that Trump’s poor performance in hypothetical races against Clinton predict how he
would actually do in the general. Since
Wang, after some very complex modelling, puts Trump’s current chance of the nomination
at 70%, I think we must prepare ourselves for a Trump/Clinton race. I choose, at least for a while, to take
comfort in his interim calculations.

Sunday, April 10, 2016

While having dinner with Susie this evening [we eat early], the following thought occurred to me. Suppose Trump comes into the convention with 1250 pledged delegates -- a bare 13 over the 1237 mark. Paul Ryan calls the roll, and when the all the states have been polled, Trump has 1230 votes. Everyone in the world has been keeping track, and it is clear that 20 delegates have not voted. A quick check reveals that they are not in the hall -- they are "sick," something they ate, and are in their hotel rooms.Ryan has a good deal of power, either to suspend the vote, if he chooses, while they are dragged into the hall, or to wait a proper ten minutes and then declare the first ballot concluded with no one getting the required majority. On the second ballot, 200 "Trump" delegates defect, as they are permitted to do, and Trump loses decisively.Does anyone want to make book on what Trump might then do?This thing is far from over.

As a blogger, I always have the option simply not to respond
to a comment posted on my blog, but there are some comments that simply must be responded to, and Jim’s comment
is most assuredly one of that small number, so here goes. First, for those of you who have not read it,
let me quote the entire comment:

“Professor
Wolff --

Your post opens up an opportunity to express
something I have wanted to confront for some time. You pose a great question,
which is:

"How much bad behavior, if any, should the
rest of us be expected to put up with from those extraordinary individuals
whose musical [or intellectual or other artistic] talents set them apart from
the ordinary run of mortals?"

Based on my life experience, I would argue
absolutely none. Why? Because they can do better. (Which, by the way, is a
constant exhortation of the Sanders campaign, which he has borrowed -- among
other themes -- from the 1988 Jesse Jackson campaign). There is no reasonable
excuse for that kind of behavior. Do you think so? I certainly don't.

Now, I did not always think this way. From my
first encounter with you, Professor Wolff, I have always thought of you as an
"extraordinary individual" who I could learn an amazing amount of
knowledge from. For Christ sake, you would repeatedly say in class the
following statement: "You can learn something from every word I say."
Well, I took that statement to heart and still do to this day. Consequently, I
accepted your eccentricities and at times dismissive attitude as something I
should be "expected to put up with." As a result, when I later met
Lawrence Foster in the philosophy department at UMass Boston (circa 1992), I
proudly proclaimed that I was a big fan of yours. His blunt and dismissive
response: "Hell of an ego with that guy." My absolutely genuine,
sincere, and earnest response to him was: "And rightly so, since he is
quite brilliant." Professor Foster shook his head and walked away. At the
time, my thinking was, what is this guy's problem? But as I grew older and
continued to learn more, I realized that great, talented, and extraordinary
people do NOT have an excuse to belittle those "below" them. Why? Well
you, as a self-proclaimed Marxist should know. We are all in the struggle of
life together. Why excuse some asshole who can sing, paint, or write well?
Because we culturally "benefit" from his or her work? Even so, that
does not give them the privilege to belittle others. On top of that, there are
extraordinarily talented people who are actually good, kind, caring, and
selfless people who go out of their way to help others. It is an individual,
personal trait, not a talented trait. I will never stop quoting Jackson:
"We can do better."

At base, there really should be no place for
diva behavior. The most genuine and sincere people know this. These kinds of
behaviors should not simply be excused but should be deemed unacceptable. I
once had patience for it. I certainly don't now. Short answer: I would have
canned Battle.

Keep in mind that I reached this decision based
in a large part on your teaching. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Well, finally got that off my chest. Thanks for
opening the door.

Your eternally sincere student,

Jim”

First things
first: If I ever was dismissive, I most
humbly apologize. I never intended that,
and I am appalled that anything I said or did came across that way. Eccentricities, to be sure. They are the spice of life. But not dismissiveness toward a student. Let me be clear: uncompromising criticism of a student’s
writing or reasoning is the absolute precondition of genuine education. But criticism of what a student has written
or said is not dismissiveness of the student as a person and as a student. Quite to the contrary. By speaking up in class or submitting a piece
of written work, the student has announced his or her desire to learn, and it
is the absolute responsibility of the teacher to do whatever is possible to assist
in that learning. That is what I have
tried to do for the past sixty years, and if I have failed, that failure is on
my head, not on the student’s.

Was Larry
Foster right? Oh yes, to be sure. I do indeed have a big ego. Why on earth do you suppose I like to
reference Emily Dickinson, one of the most arrogant poets ever to write! I may on occasion strive to hide my light
under a bushel [though not with as much success as I might imagine], but no one
ever accused me of thinking it was a dim light.
I leave it to Brian Leiter to judge its wattage.

Now to the
question at hand. Of course Kathleen
Battle should be ashamed of herself for her boorish and inexcusably
self-involved behavior. Nothing I said
suggested there was any excuse for that.
Should she have been fired? Well,
that is an administrative decision, involving all manner of considerations,
only some of which are artistic. But I
would hope that the musicians, stage hands, and front office folks, while
despising her for the utter bitch she obviously was, would find a way to make
it possible for her to continue singing at the Met, because the only reason any
of them are there is to make music, and she simply made music better than
others. Shun her, condemn her to
Purgatory after death, say nasty things about her on Twitter, never invite her
to dinner or share a drink with her, but let her keep singing.

One final word,
a propos politics and the
struggle. Karl Marx was, by all
accounts, a rather appalling individual, at least as he comes across in Jerrold
Siegel’s fine biography, Marx’s Fate. The great theorist of exploitation exploited
everyone around him unconscionably: he
cadged money from colleagues who were living on smaller incomes, he was
unthinkingly cruel and unsympathetic to his lifelong colleague Engels on the
occasion of the death of Engels’ love, he got the family maid pregnant – he was
an all around rotter. I am quite sure I
would neither have liked him nor admired him as a man, and I do not for a
moment think that his greatness as a thinker excuses his behavior. Nor do I think, if I were presented with one
of those absurd trolley car cases, that saving his life, because he was such a
great thinker, would have any priority over saving the lives of two unimportant
workingmen. But he was the greatest social theorist who has ever lived, and if it had
been up to me to do what I could to keep him writing, I would have done
it. I rather think that is what Engels
thought secretly.

Well, once
more, to Jim, I apologize for having behaved as it seems I did, and I thank you
for having the greatness of soul to forgive me.

After twenty-two years in exile, Kathleen Battle has been
invited back to the Met to sing a concert of spirituals. For those of you who do not know, Battle had
[and perhaps still has] one of the most beautiful soprano voices ever
heard. Her recording of Handel’s Semele is beyond exquisite. Her CD with Wynton Marsalis of baroque arias
is perhaps the greatest musical collaboration ever. [She apparently also had an affair with him,
which just makes it all the more perfect – two gods disporting themselves on
Mt. Olympus.] But Battle was such an
utterly, intolerably, offensively self-importantly irrational diva that at the
height of her career she was banned from the Met and never sang grand opera
again. When her banning was announced to
the cast of whatever she was rehearsing at the time, they burst into applause.

Which raises, at least for me, an important question: How much bad behavior, if any, should the
rest of us be expected to put up with from those extraordinary individuals
whose musical [or intellectual or other artistic] talents set them apart from
the ordinary run of mortals? I am not
talking about really immoral behavior, like murder or spousal abuse or child
molestation or voting Republican – just arrogant, thoughtless, self-absorbed
diva-ness. And my answer to that
question is: as much as we have to put
up with to get the performance. Grand
Opera, or indeed any other form of art, is a collaboration for only one
purpose, to create a moment of transcendent beauty. An inferior musical performance from a genial,
thoughtful, decent, caring, all-round nice guy with whom it is a delight to
work is never preferable to a moment of true beauty from an impossible diva
whom one dearly wants to strangle.

Amadeus represents
Mozart [probably inaccurately] as a scatological, perpetually adolescent
buffoon who just happens to be one of the greatest composers ever to live. Salieri hates him, envies him, plots to bring
about his downfall, but is, more than anyone else in Mozart’s world, able to
recognize the divinity of his music. It
is that recognition that lies at the heart of Peter Shaffer’s play. Something similar animates Good Will Hunting.

Would I have applauded Battle’s dismissal, had I been a
member of the Met orchestra? Of
course. I am human. But would I have dismissed her, had I been
the conductor? Maybe, but I would hope
not.

Saturday, April 9, 2016

I have more or less stopped keeping close tabs on Trump's delegate count in relation to my original estimates, but it is a slow Saturday, so I thought I would check. As near as I can tell, Trump is now roughly 40 delegates ahead of my original estimates, which would put him just over the 1237 mark at the end of the process. He has made a number of unforced errors, and has been revealed to be woefully incompetent at the business of rounding up strays, compared to Cruz, but even so, he seems to me to be the odds on favorite to get the nomination.Since Clinton is proving to be an awful candidate, we can only hope that Trump is her opponent, because she will crush him, however well or badly she would do against any of the other Republicans.Meanwhile, Bernie is off to the Vatican. And they said he wasn't really a politician!

On the 21st of this month I will travel to
Providence, RI and Boston, MA to speak at Brown and MIT about my work on
Marx. I genuinely believe that my work
is unique. No one else, to my knowledge,
has so much as asked how one might unite the literary and mathematical dimensions
of Marx’s theory of capitalist exploitation, let alone attempted to do it, as I
have. But alas, my work has received
very little attention. Brooding on this
has put me in mind of a story from sixty years ago.

In 1956, when I was a twenty-two year old doctoral student
in the Harvard Philosophy Department finishing up my dissertation, the Graduate
Philosophy Club invited a retired Michigan professor, Roy Wood Sellars, to
speak. Sellars, father of the much
better known Wilfred Sellars, was unimaginably old. He must have been five or six years younger than
I am now. He delivered a long,
plaintive, cranky, complaining speech, the message of which was that his
Mid-Western version of causal realism had never received a fair hearing in the
profession because the East Coast version of causal realism dominated the
journals. We all sat there in stunned
silence, desperately trying to remember what causal realism is.

And here I am, preparing to travel north from Chapel Hill to
complain that my version of Marx has not received the attention it deserves
because Analytical Marxism is all the rage.

I hope that in half a century, when those young folks are my
age and tell this story, they will be kind.

Friday, April 8, 2016

For a century and a half, Marxists have been laboring to replace old-fashioned conspiracy theories with more sophisticated structural accounts of the functioning of international capitalism, but the sneaky bastards who run the big companies, and their allies in government, keep undermining our elegant, complex, intellectually satisfying accounts by just gathering in back rooms and conspiring. The mother lode of all secrets, the so-called Panama Papers, is now in the process of being released to the world, and it is beyond breathtaking. You can find an extended account of it all here. Everyone is involved [except the Americans -- they prefer the Cayman Islands to Panama.] Even Jean Marie le Pen and his daughter are caught up in it. There has got to be a German word for something beyond mere schadenfreude.

Readers of this blog will, I am sure, all agree, that I am a nice guy -- easy-going, friendly, slow to anger, an all around swell fellow. But I have my limits, and I have finally had it with Paul Krugman's sucking up to Hillary Clinton and his ceaseless attacks on Bernie. I mean, I understand why. Clinton is no threat at all to the established arrangements that Krugman makes a great show of questioning but which he really cannot stand to see threatened. Bernie, despite all his flaws and inadequacies, really is stirring up anti-capitalist emotions that no Nobel Laureate in Economics can countenance. But I have had enough. I am going to remove the link to Krugman's blog from my command line in Google Chrome. That will leave him with only a zillion followers and "friends," so he probably won't notice, but I have my pride.There, I have done it. Now I can look at myself in the mirror each morning. I feel so much better.

Thursday, April 7, 2016

While I was out shopping for dinner, the comments section exploded
with a series of very interesting and knowledgeable responses to my defense of
Bernie’s call for free public higher education.
My thanks to all of you. Rather
self-interestedly, I take it as a tribute to this blog that its readership is
so classy. J Let me try briefly to add a few responses.

First of all, I cannot figure out where I got my original
income figures, but they are totally wrong.
S. Wallerstein’s are correct. My
point remains, concerning the relative wealth of America and France. Sorry about that.

Second, it is quite true that the federal structure of the
United States and the state rather than federal responsibility for education
makes the situation here much more complicated. But the general principle that elementary and
secondary education should be universal and free has gained acceptance in our
system, and so could the principle that tertiary education should be free. Bernie is not, so far as I can see, supposing
that such a principle can be implemented by the waving of a wand, and certainly
not by an Executive order. He is trying,
for the first time, to make this principle part of the core commitment of one
of the two major political parties.
Clinton is not prepared to sign on to that principle. If she were, a useful conversation could be
initiated in the Democratic Party about how to implement it.

Third, David Palmeter is quite correct about the
extraordinary inflation in tuition costs.
When I entered Harvard in 1950, tuition was $600 a year [I recall it as
$400, but the distinguished logician and philosopher Charles Parsons, my classmate,
graduate apartment mate, Columbia colleague, and long-time friend, recalls it
as $600, and I learned long ago that in all such matters Charles is always
correct.] That is $5900 in 2016
dollars. Tuition this year at Harvard is
$57,200, almost ten times the inflation rate!!!
Why do they charge so much? Because
they can. Then they use their enormous
endowment to underwrite grants to many of their students. It would take me a long time to begin to
explain the explosion in costs, but one thing is for sure: it is not an explosion of faculty salaries.

Fourth, there are all sorts of ways in which the French
higher educational system is inferior to the American, setting to one side the
so-called grandes écoles, and I am
actually a big fan of the American system, though not of its cost. To cite just one among many of its virtues,
in America it is quite possible for a high school graduate to take some of the
academic courses at a local Community College, then transfer those credits to a
branch of the state four year college system, eventually graduate and gain
admission to a post-graduate program at a campus of the state university
system, and thus climb the ladder educationally. There are many educational systems around the
world in which that sort of portability of credits and steady rise is just
impossible.

Hillary Clinton and her fans [notably Chris Matthews] have had a fine time ridiculing Bernie's proposal that public college education be free. Matthews especially cannot control his smirk as he says, in a stagey incredulous voice, "He wants to make Berkeley and Madison, Wisconsin free!," somehow imagining that the cost of higher education bears any direct relation to its quality, as though it were a house.Well, at two a.m. this morning I decided to check a few facts. Here is a sample of what I found:Gross income per capita in the United States: $15480Gross income per capita in France: $12,445So America is somewhat richer than France.Percentage of adults 25-34 with a B.A. in the U.S.: 43% [higher than I thought]Percentage of adults 25-43 with a B.A., in France: 43%So America and France educate the same proportion of adults at the tertiary level.Average in-state tuition at public universities and colleges in the U.S.: $13,856Average tuition at French universities [almost all public]: $ 585How can this be? Simple. France has made a collective public decision to make college essentially free, just like elementary and secondary education. America has not made that decision yet. Bernie says we should. Can we afford it? Yes, somewhat more easily than France can, because we are somewhat richer.It is that simple.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

In my never-ending struggle to see a glass less than
half-full as almost overflowing, I undertook a little experiment. General elections are won by electoral votes,
not by total popular votes or anything else.
So when Hillary Clinton has big wins during the Primaries in states that
no Democrat is going to carry in the Fall, then we ought to discount those wins
as having no relevance for the General Election, right? [You can see where this is going]. I started with the list of states Obama won
in 2012, and then put in Bernie’s column the states where he has already won a
primary or caucus and put in Hillary’s column the states where she has done the
same. Then I looked up the electoral
votes each state will have in 2016, and added them up. Here are the results:

Sunday, April 3, 2016

While I was in computer purgatory, Donald Trump, whose
eventual nomination I have been confidently predicting, took some major steps
toward inflicting on himself wounds from which he may not recover. I confess I simply did not anticipate the depths
of his stupidity. Serious policy wonks
will focus on his bold refusal to take “off the table” the possibility of using
nuclear weapons in Europe, but my attention, like that of most of America, was captured
by the moment in the Chris Matthews “town hall” interview when Mr. Trump, his
face screwed up in a caricature of serious thinking, offered the opinion that
women who have abortions “must be punished.”
It was, both for Trump and for Matthews, a tour de force. Trump managed
in one magical moment to unite the pro-life and pro-choice forces, which have
been locked in a death struggle for half a century. Matthews managed finally to puncture Trump’s
façade of imperturbability and force him to reveal himself for the blustering
fool he is.

It was transparently clear that Trump had never given a
moment’s thought to the question of abortion, beyond embracing what he repeatedly
refers to ritually as the Ronald Reagan position – “pro-life with exceptions”
[i.e., “rape, incest, and the life of the mother.”] The anti-abortion forces for decades have
been piously referring to the pregnant woman, with staggering illogic, as “the
victim” in an abortion, despite insisting that the abortion she seeks and pays
for is murder. Poor Donald, who had neglected
to take note of this talking point, can be seen in the video painfully thinking
his way through the question whether, should abortion be illegal, the woman
should be punished, and drawing the logical, but absolutely forbidden,
conclusion that she should be. At that precise
moment, Donald Trump ceased to be the inevitable Republican nominee. Mind, he may still he be unstoppable. The next month or so will tell. But as someone commented, he has become one
of the undead – no longer viable, but possibly unstoppable nonetheless.

I have been rather critical of Matthews in this space, so I
think it is only fair for me to give credit where it is due. Matthews was brilliant, relentless,
undistracted by Trump’s attempt to re-direct the conversation to Matthews’ Catholicism. It is worth watching the entire exchange and
not just the eight or nine second sound bite in which Trump utters the fateful
line that there “must be punishment” for the woman. What fascinated me was that Matthews got
Trump to say those words by bullying him.
He simply refused to let Trump off the hook, as every other interviewer
has thus far. Trump could have refused
to answer – by far the wiser course. But
Matthews just plain bullied him into giving a reply. Trump was revealed, in that moment, as all
bullies eventually are, as a craven coward, not at all an alpha male, who
cannot stand up to someone who is simply stronger than he is.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

On April 21st and 22nd I shall
be heading north from Chapel Hill to give two lectures. At Brown, I shall be offering the last in a
series of Political Theory workshops that have been taking place every second
week throughout the year. Then on the 22nd,
I shall speak to a faculty study group at MIT organized by a young Political
Scientist there. On both occasions, my
topic will be the work I have done over forty years on the thought of Karl
Marx. My theme, I am a trifle
embarrassed to say, is rather self-congratulatory. I shall be arguing that my work on Marx is quite
literally unique. I am unaware of anyone
else who has ever attempted to do what I have done. Indeed, I am unaware of anyone who has even
conceived the idea of doing what I have done, namely, merging a philosophical
and literary critical analysis and interpretation of Capital with a mathematical reconstruction of the economic theory
set forth in that text, thereby producing not simply several disparate interpretations
side by side but a unified, integrated literary/mathematical understanding of
Marx’s reading of bourgeois capitalism.

There is a deeper and broader thesis underlying this
work, viz. that because society is
inevitably and unavoidably ideologically encoded and mystified, all fully satisfactory
social theory must be written in an ironic voice that acknowledges and
communicates that mystification, all the while seeking to penetrate and supersede
it. One of the secondary implications of
this thesis, incidentally, is that successful works of social theory, like
great works of fiction, cannot be redacted in textbooks but must be read in the
original authorial voice. That is why
we read Capital itself even though we
can quite well acquaint ourselves with Chemistry without reading Lavoisier.

The MIT folks have promised to read the brief 25,000
word summary of my work that I posted on this blog under the title “A Unified Reading
of Marx.” [I sent it to them as an email
attachment seven months ago.] The Brown
group, alas, have not made that commitment, so I shall have to try to
communicate in thirty minutes some elements of what it would take me two hours
or more to summarize.

I have been in computer hell for three days, but I now have a new computer, courtesy of Best Buy, whose Geek Squad transferred over my files and bookmarks and such. The only thing that did not survive was the record of my wins and losses in tens of thousands of games of Spider Solitaire and such. Indeed, the game programs did not survive. So I start once again from scratch. A good deal happened while I was in limbo. Comments to follow.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.